Tuesday, July 06, 2010

My few last days in Europe were spent attending a demoparty inMaaseik, Belgium. I always wanted to be in a demoparty and this was myfirst opportunity to do so. I didn't want to simply attend it. Iwanted to actually release a demo! My choice of development platformwas the Phillips Videopac G7000 (european name), also known asMagnavox Odyssey² (in USA). In Brazil it was released as "Odyssey" since the original one has never been released here, so the number 2 in the name would not make much sense in the brazilian market.

I've had one of these in Brazil since my childhood, but I did not bringit with me to my Europe trip (as I didn't want to risk loosing it ordamaging it for whatever reason). Because of that I tried to buy aVideopac on eBay and have it delivered to Brussels, where mybrazillian friend Leandro Lameiro lives nowadays, so that we coulddevelop and showcase the demo in a real machine during Rewired 2010.But then, unfortunately, the french guy who sold me a Phillips c52didn't send the item at all. Also, I have contacted Sören Gust,trying to buy a development cartridge from him, but he didn't have aspare one to sell. I though about building one myself in some europeanhackerspace (I have visited many of them during june), but then thefact that the real console was not delivered made me give up andsimply focus on emulator-based development.

I knew that it would potentially not be the same as developing in thereal machine, but I needed to release something at the demoparty and Iwanted to do something wild instead of simply making a PC demo. I havenever coded demos before, so I was not expecting to do somethingawesome. So, my strategy was to do something interesting based on thenovelty of it instead of technical sophistication. Indeed, this was(as far as I can tell) the first demo ever for the Videopac/Odyssey² !

I was happy when the emulator properly rendered the results that Iintended to see when I implemented the Video Display Controller (VDC)trick to change charactere configuration in the middle of the screenin order to overcome the hardware restriction of only being able touse only 12 characteres oncreen at a given time. Initially I expectedthat the emulator would simply not emulate the trick at all. When itshowed up, I though it was nice and I supposed that it was the correctemulation. My friend Leandro Lameiro have commented about the issue ofoverlapping characteres (that he had read about in some videopacforum) but we had no way to test it on a real machine to be sure.

I was also interested in releasing the demo as free software, becauseI am not happy with the overall secrecy aspect of the demoscene. Iwould like to encourage more people to learn how do code demos andthen I think it is essential that we release our source codes and letpeople learn! So, now that Mark Guttenbrunner (a.k.a. "manopac") has contacted me by email pointing out thisdiscussion on the Netherlands Videopac Forum, it makes me really proudto know that the source code was actually checked out by at least oneperson who found it useful.

I'd like to give a brief explanation of the name of our demoscene group.When we were planning our participation in this demoparty we havesubmited an entry in their website informing our name & country sothat the organizers and other people in the scene could have a generalidea of who would attend. This form obligated us to provide a groupname. But I had no group! I noticed that other people (probably in thesame context) had simply provided "-" as the group name (a dashcharactere). So I just followed the pattern. Then, in the party I havemet Niels van Dijkhuizen (NebulaH) who joined me and my brazilianfriend Leandro Lameiro and we decided to release the demo under thegroup name "DashCrew" :-)